Noam Chomsky: Meet the universal man

By Graham Lawton

Why can everyone learn Portuguese? Are some aspects of our nature unknowable? Can you imagine Richard Nixon as a radical? Is Twitter a trivialiser? New Scientist takes a whistle-stop tour of our modern intellectual landscape in the company of Noam Chomsky

Let’s start with the idea that everyone connects you with from the 1950s and 60s – a “universal grammar” underlying all languages. How is that idea holding up in 2012?It’s virtually a truism. There are people who misunderstand the term but I can’t deal with that. It’s perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.